I read the article in last week’s Star Mail with dismay. Mr Goodman ‘a Jewish man’ has made some statements I believe are extremely questionable, biased and in some cases factually untrue. In this article I seek to educate, this is necessarily a brief historical response to the article.
I am a pro-Palestine activist and have been studying the situation in the Middle East for many years. In July 2023 I visited Palestine, staying in East Jerusalem and the Old City of Jerusalem. I visited the Palestinian cities of Ramallah, Hebron and Bethlehem as well as Tel Aviv and other places in Israel. I spoke to both Palestinians and Jews, I visited a refugee camp in Bethlehem and a military court, amongst other places of political and social interest.
Some facts that cannot be disputed are those around the history of the last 77 years since the creation of Israel under the auspices of the United Nations in 1947. In 1948 Israeli paramilitary groups, (they later became the IDF) attacked more than 500 villages and killed about 15,000 Palestinians. These villages were destroyed and more than 750,000 people were displaced, as recognised by Amnesty International. People were forced to walk away from their homes and communities of hundreds of years. They became refugees, some in their own land, in other parts of Palestine. There are several camps in Gaza, now rubble, some found refuge in the many camps in Jordan, Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East. At that time 56 per cent of the land became Israel. The rest was designated Palestine in two areas, The West Bank, then administered by Jordan and Gaza administered by Egypt. Jerusalem was divided 50/50. At that time there were twice as many Palestinians as there were Jews, though they were allocated less than half the land. The areas that were emptied of their Arab populations at that time are now home to Israeli Jews, many from other countries in the world, with limited or no familial or historical links to the area.
There have been ongoing hostilities between Israel and various Palestinian factions. In 1967 the Six Day war between Israel, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, ended with Israel occupying both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Since that time there has been a steady increase in Jewish migration to Israel from other parts of the world and settlements, most but not all of them illegal under international law, have been built on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Hostilities usually from armed settlers, supported by the IDF, towards Palestinian civilians have increased exponentially since October ‘23.
The population of Palestine up until the 1930s was approximately 86 per cent Palestinian, nine per cent Christian and three per cent Jewish, an 1878 Census indicated. It had been ruled under the Ottoman Empire for 400 years until 1917, when it was replaced by a British military occupation mandated by the League of Nations. The UN’s The Question of Palestine study estimated the Jewish population in the 1920s rose from 10 per cent to 17 per cent. This rose again after World War II. Maps of the time clearly record Palestine, contrary to Mr Goodman’s assertion. It was a culturally and socially vibrant country with the disparate ethnic groups living side by side, for the most part harmoniously.
Zionist Jewish groups, that do not represent all Jewish people, believe that they are the only people entitled to live in the land between the Mediterranean sea and the Jordan river. The Zionist view of Palestine is that it is the historic and ancestral homeland of the Jewish people based on the Old Testament. The Balfour declaration in 1917 talked about a ‘national Home for Jewish people in Palestine’, it also said ‘it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious’ rights of existing non-Jewish communities’.
Palestine has for thousands of years been the home of Arab Palestinians with Jews and Christians being a minority part of the population.
Mr Goodman’s assertion that a two-state solution has been on the table ‘throughout history’ is incorrect. It was first suggested by the British Peel commission in 1937 and the partition in 1948 created areas that were supposedly Palestinian. The Oslo Accords of the 1990s were an attempt to end the resulting conflict. Those negotiations with the involvement of Norway and America were ultimately unsuccessful.
Hamas is described as a terrorist organisation, yet they were voted the majority party in the last election in Gaza in 2006. We must not forget that the majority of the two million residents of Gaza are unable to leave, Israel controls all entries and exits, thus controlling movement of the population and enabling the control of food into The Strip causing a planned famine and genocide.
We should put the horrific events of 7 October 2023 into the context of all of the past history and the ongoing trauma and destruction wreaked by the Israeli occupation. The disproportionate response of Israel’s government has led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being killed in Gaza by Israeli bombing and troops, most of them unrecorded, buried under the rubble of their homes, schools, universities and hospitals. Many of them were women and children targeted by those IDF troops.
